1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to voicemail and email, and more particularly to an apparatus and method for forwarding voicemail as email or as a web page.
2. Background Art
Caller ID allows suitably equipped telephone equipment to determine and display, at the called party's premises, the identity of the person placing a phone call, or, more specifically, the telephone number of the calling phone and usually an identification of its owner.
Speed dial and other local storage techniques are known, which allow a telephone user to store names and numbers of other people, typically those called frequently.
Some telephones have the ability to, when receiving a phone call, use the numeric caller ID information to search through such speed dial memory, such that what is displayed is the locally stored name of the caller rather than the name which the telephone company may provide as part of the caller ID info itself. For example, one's telephone may display “Dad” when he calls, rather than the name “Clapper, Robert” under which the calling telephone is subscribed to the phone company.
Computer-based voicemail systems and answering machines are known. They digitize incoming voicemail messages and store them, typically on a hard drive or in memory, for later playback by the phone's owner.
Various audio encoding techniques are known. For example, digital waveforms may be represented in .WAV files. Other encoding techniques are known, which use less storage space than .WAV files, such as MP3 technologies.
Telephone and other information lookup sites are known on the internet. For example, www.anywho.com provides the ability to not only look up a telephone number for a known name, but also the ability to do a “reverse phone book lookup” which provides the name associated with a given phone number. Other, similar services enable the lookup of street address, email address, website, and so forth, based on known names or other data.